Current AI: A Survey and Critique

With the recent attention of the user community to the “successes” of large language models (LLMs), it is easy to overlook the extension and depth of AI research and practice over the past seventy years. Beginning with the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop where the name artificial intelligence was first suggested, this new discipline branched out in multiple directions. In fact, many of these early AI research areas were to become the foundation for the later emergence of what we now call computer science. In this paper, we review the highlights of the major research and application areas of artificial intelligence including the symbol-based, genetic/emergent, probabilistic and neural network/deep learning. We conclude with several comments on the problems and promise of AI and the current generation of LLMs.